D-squared, sitting in profile to Richard, one elbow on the table cradling his pipe, turned to meet his eye. The pipe, supported by the hand, remained motionless, making it look as though cartoon character physics was in effect. “Make them out to be the dupes?”
“Yes, erect some kind of backstory where they had been seduced into this massive act of betrayal by fast talkers of some stripe who later turned out to be not what they seemed.”
“What about the blue hair?”
“We might have to finesse that a little, but the gist of it is that the people who signed up for this rebellion were told to wear gaudy clothes and adornments as a badge, so that they would know who was in on the conspiracy.”
“ ‘We’ve all been made fools of!’ ” the Don repeated. “Seems almost like sour grapes, doesn’t it, when you put it into the mouths of people you’re not especially fond of.”
“Again. Finesse.”
“What sorts of emergency powers might you be willing to put in the hands of the—it pains me, Richard, to hear these words coming from my own lips—Earthtone Coalition?”
“A full answer could get obnoxiously technical. The game stats are very complicated. So, if we wanted to be sneaky about it, there are all sorts of ways we could put our thumb on the scale, as you said earlier. Or we could just be obvious about it and invoke some new deity or previously unknown deep feature of the world’s history.”
“Which would need to be written.”
“Which would need to be written.”
Day 4
A side effect of being chained in the powder room was being out of the loop. Zula had no idea what was going on. She ate her military rations and slept surprisingly well and woke up in good spirits. Not that her situation had improved. But at least she had tried something. She could hear people coming and going via the elevators. Since she had no windows, no phone, and no watch, she couldn’t tell what time it was.
She had managed to sneak a ballpoint pen into her pocket yesterday, so she wrote a letter to her family on paper towels, rolled it up, and stuffed it into the drainpipe she had disconnected yesterday. Maybe some plumber would see it when he came to fix the drain, and bring it to the attention of a supervisor, and eventually it would make its way to someone who could read English. She hoped so. She was proud of that letter. It was not devoid of humor.
Sokolov knocked once, then entered the ladies’ room and bid her good morning. He removed the handcuff from her ankle and escorted her out. “Leaving forever,” he said, “bring your stuff.”
They took the elevator to the ground floor and walked out the main entrance of the office building onto the front drive, a sweeping horseshoe partially covered by an awning, where a van was waiting for them with its engine idling and its rear doors splayed open. Standing behind it were four of the security consultants, wearing stupid hats, variously smoking or fussing with a stack of plastic coolers and rod-and-reel cases that had been packed in the back. As was invariably the case, they were being observed by a thousand Chinese people and an unknowable number of security cameras. But all the people doing tai chi in the shade of the trees, the uniformed schoolgirls streaming out of the ferry terminals, the taxi drivers killing time in the adjoining square, the paired PSB officers, the carters, the construction workers showing up to work on the skyscraper, all these people just looked at the scene around the van for a few seconds and reckoned that it was a bunch of crazy foreign visitors going fishing.
Peter and Csongor were in the backseat. Qian Yuxia was behind the wheel. Next to her, riding shotgun, was Ivanov, talking to Yuxia in the charming style of which he had exhibited flashes during the interview in Peter’s loft in Seattle. They were talking about gaoshan cha, high mountain tea, and Ivanov’s plan to distribute it in Russia, where he was certain it would be enormously successful.
Zula was strongly encouraged to enter the van by its side door and sit in the back between Peter and Csongor. As she climbed in Yuxia greeted her with, “Good morning, girlfriend, you ready to catch some lunkers?” and Zula nodded back at her, wondering if there was anything she could say at this moment that would persuade Yuxia to put the van in gear and shove the gas pedal all the way to the floor. That would lead to a situation where they were far away from the security consultants but Ivanov would still be in the van with them. It seemed almost inconceivable that he wasn’t carrying a weapon of some kind. So what would it boot them unless Yuxia had the presence of mind to drive straight to a Public Security Bureau station and crash its front gates?
“Lots to talk about,” Peter remarked, fixing her with a dirty look.
“What the hell is she doing here?” Zula asked Csongor.
“For this operation, a van was necessary,” Csongor said. “When Ivanov heard about Yuxia, he said, ‘She’s perfect, give me her phone number,’ and then he called her and talked her into this.”
“Okay.” Zula said, not in the sense of I accept this but rather I see how horrible this is. She had a fretful feeling, now, of having missed a hell of a lot during her captivity in the ladies’ room. “But yesterday—what happened?”
“After Sokolov put you in the taxi at the wangba, he told Yuxia that it was time to buy ice chests now, and so the two of them left.” Csongor paused, maybe looking for a way to say the next part diplomatically. “I think it was on his way back from that errand that he ran into you.”
“Actually, I ran into him,” Zula said, “but go on.”
“What was that about anyway?” Peter demanded. “You could have gotten us killed!”
A new thing happened now, which was that Csongor torqued his great barrel-shaped torso toward Zula and leaned forward so that he could get a clear view of Peter. He braced one hand against the seat in front of him. The other he let fall on the top of the seat close to Zula’s head, carefully not touching her but making her feel half enveloped. He fixed Peter with a gaze that Zula would have found intimidating had it been aimed at her. Csongor’s head seemed as big as a basketball and his eyes were wide open and unblinking and aimed at Peter’s face as if connected by steel guy wires. “It was about her having her shit together,” Csongor said.
“But the Russians—” Peter began, shocked by the sudden turn in Csongor’s personality.
“The Russians loved it,” Csongor said flatly. Then, looking at Zula: “They were talking about you half the evening. You can be sure there are no hard feelings on their account. Or on mine.”
“What about him, though!?” Peter demanded, with a glance up at Ivanov. “His are the only feelings we have to worry about.”
“I’m not so sure that is the case—”
Zula held up both hands between them, then made the fists-crashing-together gesture again. “Let’s go back to the wangba if you don’t mind, since I know nothing.”
“Okay,” Csongor said. “The other Russians came upstairs and hung around with me for a while and kept an eye on the T’Rain players you spotted. We were there for six hours watching those guys. It became sort of obvious that one of them was the boss. Tall guy, a little older than the others, in a Manu jersey.”
“Manu jersey?”
“Manu Ginobili,” Peter said, almost angry that Zula did not understand the reference. “He plays for the Spurs.”
“Manu, as we called him, never played T’Rain himself, he didn’t get into it emotionally, just watched what was going on and talked on his phone constantly and told the other guys where they should send their characters and what they should do. So one of those guys”—Csongor pointed with his chin at the security consultants behind the van—“went down to the street and kept hailing taxis until he got one whose driver spoke a little bit of English. He handed the driver a stack of money and said, ‘You can keep this if you help me.’ And what he told the driver was that they were going to sit there for a while, possibly all night long, but that eventually a kid in a Manu jersey was going to emerge and then they were going to follow him.”
“I’ve never heard of Manu G
inobili,” Zula said. “Is he really such a common cultural referent that—”
“Yes,” said Peter and Csongor in unison.
“So,” Csongor continued, “after another few hours, Manu came out of the wangba, and the taxi driver followed him into one of those backstreet neighborhoods and Manu went into a certain building. The Russian and the taxi driver stayed there for another couple of hours, just watching the building, and Manu didn’t come out again. But later we did see him up on the roof shooting hoops with some other young men.”
“There’s a basketball court on the roof?”
“Not a court,” Peter said, again fuming over what he saw as an inane question. “Just a hoop! We can see it clearly from the safe house.”
“Really?”
“Really. It is all of half a mile from here, as the crow flies.”
“We can look right down on it. We were up half the night watching them through binoculars,” Csongor said.
“So it’s an office building? Apartments?” Zula asked.
“Strictly apartments,” Csongor said.
“A dump,” said Peter. “Half the block is vacant.”
“How can anything be vacant in this town?”
“One block away is a construction site,” Csongor said. “The area is under development. The building and the ones around it are probably going to be demolished within a year.”
“The taxi driver was extremely helpful once he saw the wad of cash,” Peter said. “He got out of the taxi for a smoke, asked around on the street a little bit, learned some more about the building.”
“And?”
“And it has kind of a seedy reputation. The landlord can’t write long-term leases in a building that he’s itching to tear down. But he hates leaving money on the table. So he rents on a month-to-month basis to anyone who’s willing to pay in cash, no questions asked.”
“I get the picture,” Zula said.
“So, as an example, there are various foreign tenants,” Csongor said.
“Like Filipinos?”
“No,” Csongor said with a laugh, “internal foreigners.”
“What does that mean?”
“Chinese people who come from parts of China that are so far away and so different that they might as well be foreign countries.”
“Economic migrants,” Peter said. “Their equivalent of Mexicans.”
“Okay,” Zula said, “but Manu is not one of those.”
“It appears that Manu and a few other young guys are living together in one of the units. We don’t know which one,” Peter said. “They put up the basketball hoop on the roof. They go up there and hang around drinking beer and smoking and playing ball until all hours.”
“With laptops,” Csongor said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Yeah, even at two in the morning they have the laptops going. Their real office is somewhere down below, but they’ve obviously set up Wi-Fi to the roof.”
“So it’s believed that the Troll is one of these guys,” Zula said, trying to put this all together, “or that maybe they all, collectively, are the Troll. They’re running REAMDE out of this apartment. They’re having a problem with bandits attacking their victims when they go to the ley line intersection with ransom and so they are paying mostly younger kids to hang out at the wangba all day killing the bandits. Manu goes to the wangba to oversee them, but he’s constantly in touch with the apartment by phone.”
“Five minutes after Manu departed from the wangba,” Csongor said, “another guy showed up dribbling a basketball and took his place.”
“The bandit-killers work in shifts around the clock,” Zula said, translating that.
During the last minute or so, the security consultants had been climbing into the van and taking seats one by one. There weren’t enough seats and so one of them ended up sort of wedged into the space between the driver’s and passenger’s buckets up front. Sokolov slammed the rear doors closed and got in last and claimed a space that had been reserved for him.
“Everyone ready?” Yuxia called out, in a voice that easily penetrated to the back row.
Response was muted but affirmative.
Ivanov looked to the security consultant seated between him and Yuxia, and they exchanged a nod. Ivanov reached out with his left hand and placed it over Yuxia’s right hand, clamping it in place on the steering wheel. At the same moment, the security consultant reached forward and slapped a handcuff down over Yuxia’s wrist. A moment after that he had snapped the other half of the cuff over the steering wheel. Ivanov removed his hand.
“What the fuck!?” Yuxia exclaimed, pulling her hand back, testing the cuff, still convincing herself that this was really happening.
“For your benefit,” Ivanov explained.
“Benefit!?”
“When there is investigation by PSB, they will see handcuff, see that you had no choice, find you innocent.”
“Innocent of fishing?”
Ivanov opened his jacket, letting Yuxia see a shoulder holster. “Huntink.” He snapped his fingers and Sokolov handed him a map printed, apparently, from Google. It showed a satellite photo of Xiamen with streets superimposed.
“Zula! What is going on, girlfriend?” Yuxia called.
“They kidnapped me,” Zula said. “I tried to escape last night and warn you but they caught me. I am sorry you got mixed up in this.” She had told herself last night that this would be the last of crying, but tears came freely to her eyes now.
Yuxia caught that detail in the rearview mirror. “I am going to fuck you up, motherfucker!” she told Ivanov.
“Perhaps later,” Ivanov said dryly.
“It won’t help to talk to him like that, Bigfoot,” Zula said.
“We go now,” Ivanov said, “and all will be fine at end of day, exception being for Troll.” He reached over and shifted the van into drive, then gave Yuxia an expectant look.
“Who is Troll?” Yuxia said in a sullen voice. But she gave it some gas and pulled out onto the waterfront road.
Now that they were in movement toward a destination only half a mile away, a fairly basic question occurred to Zula: “Why are we even being brought along on this? Anyone know?”
“Apparently the building contains something like eighty separate units,” Peter said. “Some vacant, some not. These guys don’t know which unit the Troll is living in. They can’t just go down the hallways kicking in eighty doors; somebody will call the cops.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Zula said.
“They have convinced themselves,” Csongor said, “that if the three of us get inside the building, we can determine which unit contains the Troll.”
“Why do they believe that?”
“Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”
THE DRIVE TOOK a little while; they could have done it faster on foot. Sokolov was in occasional touch with other Russians on his walkie-talkie, which Zula had to assume was some kind of whiz-bang encrypted device, otherwise the PSB would be all over them. Since two of the Russians were missing from the van, she reckoned that Sokolov had sent out an advance party.
Csongor, who had reasonable command of Russian, supplied running translation of the walkie-talkie traffic: “He sent two guys there when it was still dark. They found a way into the building. They have been hanging out in a room in the cellar that no one uses. Accessible by a back entrance. That is where we are going.”
Yuxia, following directions from Sokolov, steered them down a street so narrow that both rearview mirrors had to be folded in against the sides of the van, and local residents had to run out into the street to pull caged poultry and large flat baskets of green tea out of their path. After a few agonizingly slow and controversial minutes of this kind of progress, they came athwart of an alley, no wider than a doorway, on their right side. The Russian on the other end of the walkie-talkie connection yelped out a single word. “Stop,” Sokolov said.
They opened the righ
t side door of the van. The Russians filed out of it into the alley and made a bucket brigade: Peter reached behind the seat and pulled out coolers and other gear, which he handed forward to Sokolov who tossed them a few feet to one of his men in the alley, and in this fashion the equipment was moved into the building’s back entrance. This was impossible to see clearly, back there in the darkness, but seemed to be twenty or thirty feet distant, on the alley’s left side. Meanwhile Zula tried to make sense of her surroundings as best she could from twisting around in her seat and craning her neck out the windows.
If the alley to their right was the back entrance, then this street ran along the side of the Troll’s building, and they were now parked at its back corner. The ground floor sported some large openings sealed off by grimy steel roll-up doors. Above those were some corrugated metal awnings, holed with rust, that stretched partway across the street above the van and made it impossible for her to see much of the upper stories.
Looking out the windshield, she could see an intersection about fifty feet ahead of them where this side street was crossed by a wider one that was crammed with the usual flow of mostly pedestrian and bicycle traffic. That street seemed to belong to a more well-illuminated part of the universe, and Zula guessed it was because construction was under way on the far side of it: the building across the street was covered with scaffolding and blue tarps, and beyond it was a gaping cavity in the city’s fabric where an arcology or something was being thrown up.
That was all Zula could see before Sokolov indicated it was time for them to make themselves useful. Csongor, Zula, and Peter clambered out over a folded-down van seat and exited into the alley. Sokolov closed the side door of the van, then followed them down the alley toward the back entrance. Yuxia, presumably following instructions from Ivanov who was still riding shotgun, pulled forward and out of view.
A minor controversy was under way in the alley, where an old lady was leaning out of her second-floor window hollering some kind of invective down at the Russians. Zula enjoyed a moment’s hope that this woman would call the PSB. Sokolov looked up at her for a few moments, then reached into his man-purse, pulled out a half-inch-thick stack of money, let her see it—this shut her up—and then hurled it at her. It shot past her through the window and thumped against something inside. She withdrew her head and closed the window. Sokolov never broke stride.